The University of Notre Dame announced on Monday that Father Robert A. Dowd will assume the role of president of the university next year. Father Dowd will succeed Father John Jenkins, who has served as president for the past 19 years. In accordance with the university’s bylaws, the president must be a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious order affiliated with Notre Dame.
In the fall of 2019, while I was a student at Notre Dame, I took a political science class taught by Father Dowd. I found him to be exceptionally kind, caring toward his students, and a genuinely good person. His motives appeared to be serving God and improving the lives of others. But when I heard in the early part of 2020 that Father Dowd had been given a high-ranking position in the university administration, I was surprised. As my professor, he had seemed humble, reserved, unambitious, and best suited for pastoral work and teaching small classes. Before his elevation, he was the director of a program at Notre Dame focused on “integral human development,” the Ford Program in Human Development Studies, but his role was a relatively small one. Becoming a bureaucrat seemed to contradict his deep pastoralism.
The rumors that he was being set up for the university’s presidency surprised me even more. His humility diverges from the conventional model of a leader. Additionally, his academic career is not what is expected of a university president, as he is still an associate professor. He has, however, authored a book, Christianity, Islam, and Liberal Democracy, that was published by Oxford University Press. Moreover, someone of Father Dowd’s mellow temperament would probably hate the high pressure that comes with being president of Notre Dame.
I think part of the reason Father Dowd was selected for the university’s presidency is his sense of ecumenism, which permeates his personal demeanor as much as it does his academic work. His classroom was set up as an open forum for students to politely engage with one another. He avoided suggesting his own political leanings so that students could feel free to voice their own opinions. Even the topics of the class focused on toleration and openness. The class began with a study of the 1965 novel The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, which tells the story of a leader who attempts to bring together two villages in Kenya that are divided by Christianity and traditional beliefs. Father Dowd’s 2015 Oxford University Press book similarly demonstrates his focus on toleration. Its thesis is that religious pluralism in Africa counterintuitively creates better environments for democracy than when one single religion dominates. While he is very open to others’ differences, Father Dowd is clear that he is a priest and that he adheres to all aspects of the faith. He begins all of his classes in prayer.
Notre Dame is struggling to reconcile its Catholic mission with its aspiration to be a preeminent national university in an America where secularism, critical race theory, and sexual liberation underscore higher education. In this environment, the selection of a man committed to toleration and unity makes sense. Father Dowd holds to the Catholic Church’s teachings on today’s most controversial issues — abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism — but inclusivity and understanding are generally his approaches to conflict. His leadership style is likely to match Pope Francis’ style of rooting everything in listening and dialogue.
Father Dowd’s lack of political commitments, openness to engaging with all, and dedicated priesthood likely made him unobjectionable to both conservatives and liberals on Notre Dame’s Board of Trustees.
The most fraught controversies at the University of Notre Dame this year were a talk by an “abortion doula” and a drag show. The talk by the “abortion doula” drew the dissent of the local bishop, Kevin C. Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, who wrote that he “consider[s] the decision to feature such a speaker on campus to be both intellectually unserious and unworthy of a great Catholic research university.” The drag show, which featured a Notre Dame student as well as a former contestant on the show RuPaul’s Drag Race dressed in drag and lip-syncing to Taylor Swift songs, drew a large protest and significant efforts to cancel the show. The drag show was permitted on the basis of academic freedom because it was part of a course, a university administrator said. (The course had been contrived for the purpose of holding the drag show.) However Father Dowd addresses similar events in the future, his response is likely to be characterized by a mild-mannered and nonconfrontational approach. (RELATED: Drag Queens Under the Golden Dome)
Father Dowd has held the line when discussing the most controversial of these issues while still signaling his prioritization of a sensitive approach. In 2021, Dowd told the Irish Rover, Notre Dame’s Catholic student newspaper, that on “issues of gender and sexual orientation,” it is important that “we’re not engaging in anything that contradicts Catholic teaching.” He also noted that it is important to respect “the human dignity of everyone” so as to “be faithful to Catholic social teaching.”
Father Dowd will also face the daunting challenge of overseeing a major research university while having relatively few years of executive experience. His most valuable assets in this endeavor will be his humility and genuine goodness. He won’t attempt a revolution or transformation, and his conscience will — I hope — speak against acquiescence to moral evil. His weakness may be his mild-mannered personality. However, given the secular hostility on campus to a greater emphasis on the promotion of the Catholic faith, a more gentle servant-leader approach could be effective.
I am cheering on Father Bob to center the University of Notre Dame around Christ. Below are some suggestions for him:
1. Cease the provision of contraceptives via the university’s health insurance plan.
The use of contraceptives to prevent pregnancy is against the teachings of the Church, as elucidated by Pope St. Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae vitae. The university previously won a religious exemption that would free it from having to provide contraceptives, but the university renounced its moratorium after progressive backlash. Stepping back into this fraught controversy — especially when the vast majority of society would view a refusal to cover contraceptives as misogynistic and oppressive — would probably be too much for Father Bob. Nevertheless, there remains hope for change. An increasing movement among even secular women to reject artificial birth control and embrace natural methods of family planning could help mitigate the backlash.
2. Stamp out radical, racist ideologies.
For a while, the University of Notre Dame resisted ideologues who seek to define people by their race. However, in recent years, the DEI crowd has successfully solidified its presence on campus. The university established the Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion this fall and placed it in one of the most high-traffic locations on campus. It also hired an assistant provost for academic diversity and inclusion earlier this year. Father Dowd must recognize the imperative to counteract efforts that perpetuate racial division and champion unity and respect. There is a growing understanding that DEI is problematic, and several states have taken action to root out its presence from higher education, so taking this stance would be less controversial than it might have been in past years.
3. Ban the top pornography sites from the university’s Wi-Fi network.
Father John Jenkins, the university’s current president, rejected a student initiative (in which I participated) advocating for this change. He justified his decision on the basis of his reluctance to intrude on students’ moral autonomy. Since Father Jenkins’ refusal, there has been an increased understanding of how pornography exacerbates human trafficking and the sexual abuse of children. In October, Pornhub was sued for the 10th time for enabling sex trafficking. And, in 2020, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times informed the public about how Pornhub “monetizes child rapes” in a high-profile essay. Moreover, numerous other Catholic universities — not to mention secular companies — already block access to such content on their Wi-Fi networks. Preventing students from using university resources to enrich the pornography industry is a no-brainer. Father Dowd could easily do so on the basis of his commitment to Catholic social teaching.
4. Stop pro-abortion lectures.
Father Jenkins allowed a number of on-campus, officially sanctioned lectures that had the explicit purpose of promoting abortion. The “abortion doula” talk featured a person whose role is to provide “physical, emotional, or financial help to people seeking to end a pregnancy,” and a talk in 2019 featured a woman who spoke about her book in which she makes the “ethical” case for abortion. Within the Catholic understanding, promoting abortion is equivalent to endorsing murder, rendering these talks incompatible with Notre Dame’s Catholic identity. The primary objective of these lectures is to weaken Notre Dame’s Catholic identity, anyway.
5. Increase academic standards.
Colleges today are making hiring decisions on the basis of a candidate’s race, sex, sexual preferences, and adherence to progressive ideologies. That gives Notre Dame an opportunity to distinguish itself by hiring on the basis of merit. And, as other universities succumb to becoming comfortable havens for fragile students, Notre Dame can demand excellence. It can oppose worthless classes — like “History of Drag,” which spurred the drag show — and instead provide academically demanding ones. Father Dowd may not be a nationally recognized scholar, but he can attract such scholars who are Catholic to come to Notre Dame.
6. Increase Notre Dame’s commitment to serving the Catholic Church.
This is something that the university is already making efforts to improve upon. For example, an institute in the business school has an initiative focused on helping parishes take advantage of their underutilized real estate. Through his leadership of the Ford Program in Human Development Studies, Father Dowd has long emphasized a goal of helping people with research that is directly applicable to them. In speaking about his work at the Ford Program in 2020, Dowd said, “We wanted to do a different kind of research…. We wanted to make sure that we weren’t simply extracting information to further our academic careers. Instead, we wanted to address the challenges that people themselves — our so-called research subjects — consider significant and to do research that is respectful of their communities.” Father Dowd could extend this same principle to promote research that benefits the global Catholic Church.
7. Increase Notre Dame’s emphasis on forming young people into people of character with strong faith.
Given Father Dowd’s pastoral sensibilities and experience living in a residence hall, this goal would be perfect for him. In accepting his election to the role of president, Father Dowd even mentioned this goal, saying, “Informed by our Catholic mission, we will work together so that Notre Dame is an ever-greater engine of insight, innovation, and impact, addressing society’s greatest challenges and helping young people to realize their potential for good.”
With Father Dowd’s inauguration on July 1, 2024, Notre Dame will enter a new era with a new president for the first time in 19 years. Leading the most prominent Catholic university in the country is a major responsibility. Father Dowd is a good man who has an opportunity to accomplish great things in his new role. I wish Father Dowd the best in helping Notre Dame fulfill the ambitious mission its founder gave to it: to “be one of the most powerful means of doing good in this country.”
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